Student drags his Titanic 15 miles

It was a tough assignment for a teenage college student. Create a large-scale model of the Titanic at home for your BTEC arts project ... but then how do you get the 7ft-long model to college when your home is 15 miles away? You cannot drive and the model is too big to get on the bus.

It was a tough assignment for a teenage college student. Create a large-scale model of the Titanic at home for your BTEC arts project ... but then how do you get the 7ft-long model to college when your home is 15 miles away? You cannot drive and the model is too big to get on the bus.

The answer is to get your friend to help you load it on to an old go-kart and push it through the night to college. And that's exactly what 17-year-old Lorin Robinson from North Somerset did. He and friend Alex Price, 16, used a trolley made from an old go-kart to get the polystyrene model from the front room of his home in Clevedon to Weston College in Weston-super-Mare in good time for the annual summer arts show.

Lorin said: "We set off about 12.50am because we thought the roads would be quieter. They were but we didn't realise how many street lights are turned off at night, so it was much darker than we thought. We only had a single torch and some lights on the model itself."

The boys pushed the model, inspired by Lorin's obsession with the doomed liner, through Kenn and on to Yatton. There, they joined the Strawberry Line cycle path, leaving it at Congresbury to walk along the A370 to the M5 roundabout, then on Weston College's university campus in Loxton Road.

The BTEC level 2 art and design student and his friend had to negotiate blind corners, trucks thundering past and even previous talk of ghosts from Lorin's mother.

"It was an amazing journey," Lorin said. "We set off in high spirits, despite the dark, but by the time we got there we were absolutely exhausted. It had taken more than six hours. We'd only had a couple of short rest stops and when we arrived and found the college not yet open, we fell asleep."

The teenagers were discovered at 7.30am outside their classroom by art and design curriculum manager Neale Jordan Mellersh. He said: "The dedication that was demonstrated by Lorin's act, whilst not advised by us, is symptomatic of the attitudes of all of the students within the faculty of art at Weston College, and underpins the huge success that is achieved by our students each and every year."

Lorin's model will now take pride of place in the college's annual creative arts summer show, featuring work from art, design, graphics, performing arts, music and photography students. More than 600 students are involved in the show which runs from June 18 to 28.

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